Too Much Victory Can Be a Bad Thing

The right-wing is riding high this week, and deservedly so. Richard Spencer (about whom I am basically ambivalent) won in court yesterday, obtaining an injunction against Auburn University keeping them from shutting down a free speech event.

And all this in the wake of the Battle of Berkeley, in which patriots took over a leftist stronghold:

But with all this victory, people are in danger of abandoning their level-headedness. The euphoria of winning clouds their judgment. They think themselves unstoppable, and they begin to underestimate their enemy.

The self-reflective anarcho-communist asks: “What tactics can we use to disrupt their events, even when there are similar numbers to our own? What differences must we put down, and alliances we need to create, in the resistance to fascism?”

Notice their discussion of moving from street weapons to firearms: “Not getting disarmed is a big part of the problem, yes, but we need more than flags and bats. We need to take notes from the John Brown Gun Club and get firearms and training.”

Notice, too, the discussion of military tactics, specifically the point of attacking in groups rather than fighting in individual skirmishes. Though the labels are not used, this was the difference between the Celtic & Roman ways of war in Britain:

It is not a problem of training, it is a problem of cohesion in action. Your thought process is very much indicative of the problem, in the sense that it expresses an individualized conception of the struggle.

It does not matter if every one of the anti-trump [sic] protestors knows how to fight, because you dont [sic] break up a fascist protest individually, doing skirmishes and one on ones.

You bash back the fash with a unified, solid, compact bloc. Rallied behind reinforced banners and with sticks and rocks to hit the fascists without having to break into a messy brawl.

It is tempting to dismiss this from our moral high horse and say that this is a naked appeal to mob violence. But it is one thing to note that it is a rejection of individual honor in favor of mob mentality – and another thing entirely to underestimate a very real threat on a military level.

No matter how morally repugnant you find the thing, moral repugnance is no argument against a tactic’s effectiveness. The Celts and Germans thought that individual battle against the Romans was the only honorable way to fight – and look who won in the end.

This is a full-scale cold war that is about to erupt into a firefight. This is not a playground dispute between groups of friends. The patriots of this country, the right-wing, the nationalists, the Trump supporters, the libertarians, the Alt-Right, the paleoconservatives – we all need to start treating this with the level of gravity it deserves.

Losing your cool to euphoria is no less a mistake than losing your cool to panic. Whether you win victory or suffer defeat, neither should keep you from thinking in a level-headed manner. Keep the struggle in mind, and keep your eye on the prize. Be a warrior, not a brawler.

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​Augustus Invictus is a jurist, writer, and political activist in Orlando, Florida. Best known as a radical philosopher and social critic, Invictus is a right-wing libertarian and a member of the Republican Party. In 2016 he ran for the United States Senate in Florida as a Libertarian, and he is a former Chair of the Libertarian Party of Orange County.

Invictus earned his B.A. in Philosophy at the University of South Florida in Tampa and his J.D. at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. Returning to his hometown of Orlando, he studied leadership at Rollins Crummer Graduate School of Business and opened the law firm for which he served as Managing Partner until his retirement from law practice.

A Southerner and a father of eight children, Invictus contends that revolutionary conservatism requires a shift in perspective from the exaltation of abstract ideologies to a focus on our families and communities.